BRAND ASSETS

• Mission Statement
• Company Values
• Demographics
• Voice
• Vector Logo
• Color Palette
• Font Styles
• Photography

MISSION STATEMENT

Your mission statement will influence your choices for prominent imagery and copy.

COMPANY VALUES

Your company values will be highlighted throughout copy and will establish the purpose driving your content.

CONTROLLED VOCABULARY

A deliberate collection of words that relate to your industry, audiences, and values. Further distilled to a list of branded words that can be "owned" by the company.

PERSONAS

Knowing who your target audience is will affect decisions in content organization, copy, imagery, and visitor flow.

BUYER'S JOURNEY

Where will you find your audience? What questions do they commonly have during their research phases? What can you develop to help answer those questions?

VOICE

Once you've identified your audience, you can develop a voice and tone to influence content writing.

VECTOR LOGO

A vector logo is critical to producing quality brand assets whether it is for print or digital use.

COLOR PALETTE

A brand uses color as an additional identifier. This is a supporting element that demands consistency.

FONT STYLES

In addition to color, typography also plays a part in building a recognizable look for your consumers.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Having stock or real photography will assist in designing valuable print and digital outreach content.

How your design team or vendor will feel with no brand information & assets...

How everyone will feel when you start a project with everything you need to succeed!

WEBSITE BUILD

• Purpose
• Platform
• Designer / Developer
• Responsive Web Design
• E-Commerce
• Hosting & Security

PURPOSE

This will determine who you work with, what type of design, content, visitor flow, and conversion points you will plan for.

Platform

DESIGNER / DEVELOPER

DIY

Minimal Cost, Templated, Time Consuming

Freelancer

Low Cost, Templated or Custom Design, Personal, Single Designer/Developer "Full Stack"

Professional Firm

Higher Cost, Fully Custom Design, Full Design & Development Teams, Added Services

Responsive WEB Design

No matter what route you take, be sure your final website will employ responsive design so that all devices can have an optimized viewing experience.

E-Commerce

Selling online requires various pieces that will allow you to process payments online. An e-commerce site will require PCI compliant web hosting, SSL security, and a payment portal.

Hosting & Security

Choose a hosting company with great support, a glowing reputation, fast performance, and solid security.

This is how everyone will feel once an awesome responsive website with well structured content is launched...

CONTENT STRATEGY

• Website Structure
• Page Content
• Evergreen Content
• Shareable Content
• Visitor Flow
• Conversion Points

WEBSITE STRUCTURE

Create content silos representing your most important content types. This will determine your website sections. About, Services, Products, News, Blog, Locations.

Avoid breaking content down so much that it creates a large confusing primary navigation.

Page Content

Every page should have the following pieces of content to support its purpose for existing. Additionally, every page should answer a question that a visitor may have.

• Page Title
• Sub Titles
• Multiple Paragraphs
• At least 1 Image with Tag
• Call-To-Action or Conversion Point
• User Friendly URL (i.e. .com/page-name)

EVERGREEN CONTENT

This is a living page of the site that will grow and be referred back to over time. As you build evergreen content it will encourage visitors to check back. This results in compounded traffic growth.

SHAREABLE CONTENT

This is content meant to motivate a visitor to send a link via email or social media to another interested party.

VISITOR FLOW

Your site, whether from the home page or a landing page, should guide a visitor from their entry point to a conversion point. The flow over a 2-4 page sequence should interest, inform, and convert.

CONVERSION POINTS

Each visitor flow should end at a conversion point. This may be an email sign up form, a product page, or a contact form. These conversion points can be used in calculating ROI.

Your visitors should feel informed, possibly entertained, and guided to an end point that they expect to land on.

DIGITAL MARKETING

• Content (SEO)
• Paid Search (SEM)
• Display Advertising
• Social Media
• Email Marketing
• Reporting ROI
• Vendor

CONTENT (SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION)

SEO is driven by content and domain reputation.

Ranking cannot be achieved without well written, focused content, having a proper keyword density. A page of web content should answer a question for a topic a visitor searched for.

Links are still important, but websites will not link to your website's pages unless they have valuable content for the users that they referring to your website. Content Marketing (blogging) will provide valuable destination links for both websites and social users to link to.

PAID SEARCH (SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING)

Paid search, also known as Pay Per Click (PPC), commonly via AdWords, offers an immediate result for your search Ads based on bid amount, competition, keyword management, & content quality.

Paid Ads should be targeted to landing pages that are independent of website site and offer an immediate conversion point (phone number, email opt-in, or contact form).

You are able to bid on unrelated keywords, but expect to see high click costs, low placement, & minimal conversions.

Display Advertising

This is part of the SEM world, it relies on participating Ad Network websites using AdSense to display your Ads via AdWords.

Display Network advertising is best used for "retargeting" past visitors of your website with visual ads linking back to your website as a reminder.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Social Media is an exposure arena as well as a display network style advertiser. The benefit to social media advertising is the access to demographics for targeting audiences.

Commonly companies will split budgets between "boosting" posts for engagement and traditional "feed advertising" for traffic sourcing.

You may also implement retargeting for feed advertisements for those that have been on your site in the past.

EMAIL MARKETING

Most customers choose to interact with a brand an average of 6 times before thinking about converting. Building an email marketing subscriber list will allow you to continue offering valuable touch points to potential customers.

Avoid using Email Marketing to simply sell. Combine your content marketing efforts with email marketing. Sending your recent valuable content to email subscribers with a call to action.

REPORTING ROI

A principal or manager at your company will expect to see ROI (Return on Investment) numbers on your digital marketing efforts. This validates the cost and analyzes how effective the current strategy is.

Know your conversion value. How much does one converted customer gross your company?

Website Analytics, Search/Social Insights, Call Tracking, & SEO Tracking will all provide acquisition & conversion percentages that you can use with your sales closing percentage to calculate ROI.

VENDOR

If you do not have the internal resources to tackle all of these tactics you may need a vendor to help.

Hire a vendor that talks about content marketing, visitor flow, conversion end points, customer engagement, and offers supporting services (web design, copywriting, graphic design) which all factor into creating, promoting, and tracking efforts.

Do not hire someone that speaks only to rankings, guarantees, keywords, and link backs. Someone who does not understand the technical and graphical aspects.

Digital Marketing is a team effort between internal point people and potentially a vendor. In either case your team should be working together on content, promotion, and finding calculated ROI values resulting in high fives.